Helping Kids Make Connections

As I’ve been enjoying my summer holidays, one thing I’ve been doing is expanding my twitter and blogging networks. I’ve been sorting through new channels in both spaces, trying to find new people who I can make connections with. While I’ve been doing this in a number of ways, one of the main things I’ve been doing is looking at the connections that are being recommended for me by different wesbsites.

Take twitter as an example.

Each time I find a new profile to follow, twitter recommends other people for me that I might be interested in looking at as well. This often leads me on interesting journeys as I click from link to link, looking for people who I might want to add to my network.

This has left me wondering why we don’t have a tool like this for kids.

While I certainly don’t have the the coding experience to do this, I’m wondering if anyone else in mynetwork might.

This is what I’m thinking:

We need a recommendation engine for students that would help them find other students around the world that they can learn with. This might have a number of different looks to it, but a simple one would be to set up a website that is sitting on the code to bring kids together. For example, a teacher might sign up his / her class on this site, getting a password back of some kind. They would then have their students add the URLs of their blogs to this site, using the password they were sent to cut down on spam. The sign up process could be very quick and clean, asking students a few questions about their age, geographic location, interests, etc. Simple google form stuff. But as well as this, the website could have some code that would suck at the tags that the person uses on their blog, creating a database of information.

Once this site has been populated by people of different ages, locations and interests, it becomes useful. After signing in, students would be able to find others to connect with around the world based on a number of things. They could search for people in their geographic area (or a completely different area “I’m interested in Africa, I wonder how many student bloggers out there my age I can find to connect with), they could find people based on how they answered the initial interest survey, they could find people based on the tags they have been using on their blogs (“I’m looking for someone writing about music”) or the website could recommend people for them to follow based on the information it has collected. For example, the site could find students who are using similar tags in their writing or who have similar interests.

The site could also recommend people for you to follow based on holes it sees in your network. (“I notice you are following few people from south east Asia, here are some possibilities for you.”) Doing this with blogs might be a place to start, but the site could also grow to include twitter feeds, flickr accounts, etc.

The entire idea behind this site would be to help students forge connections with other learners around the world, to help them become more globalized in their thinking about issues. Too often, blogging and learning networks for students only consist of people in their classroom or of people their teacher can make connections with, this type of space would help that process to become much easier.

Thoughts?

Anyone have any ideas about putting something like this together? I’m willing to donate the webspace if other people can help out with the coding.

This is a wonderful idea in helping kids make meaningful connections. This would help conversations to continue & develop & be more meaningful. Let me know if there is anything I can do, unfortunately I can’t write the code.

Hmmmm. Looks like we’re all in the same boat here. We’re all teacher-geeks, but not coding-geeks. Sounds like we need some outside expertise to be brought into this project. Is there anyone in our edu world that could handle this or does it need to be contracted out and do we need to rent a coder to look after this?

How do we spread the word to a larger audience who might be able to connect us with someone who has the skills to to build something like this?

While I don’t use Edmodo in my classroom, I am familiar with it and what it does. I am interested in putting something together that can work with any RSS feed that might come off of a blog or other service for that matter. I don’t care what service people are using (wordpress, wordpress.com, edublogs, classroomblogmeister, etc) I do not believe that enough has been doen to connect kids or to help them be able to make their own connections. I think teachers often find connections for their classroom with another classroom, but (again) I don’t think enough has been done to help kids find a connection with another kid (on any service anywhere in the world) based on interest, geography, academic need, etc.

Hi Richard; I think you are right. There is no reason that kids can’t swim on the wide open net. I believe that this always has to be the ultimate goal. This is why everything I do in my classroom is open to the world and unblocked. But unfortunately, I am not seeing it happening. In most classrooms that I talk to, the students are only connecting within their rooms or with a very small, pre-selected group of students. The networks are not growing. This is why I think a connecting place like this would be good to have. It would help those networks to grow. I think there is also some benefit in kids connecting with other kids around the world. While multi aged and multi generational groups would be best, I think it is good for kids to talk to each other.